In 1809, William Blake decided to re-launch his faltering artistic career at the age of 51 by putting on an exhibition of his works. The venue was the first floor of his brother’s haberdashery shop in Golden Square in Soho, not an obvious location for the art-loving public. Nevertheless, the poet, printmaker and artist intended the show to make an immense splash, and in the Descriptive Catalogue that he produced to accompany 16 of his pictures, he noisily advertised his anti-establishment credentials.
It is a superbly intemperate bit of grievance: “As there is a class of men, whose whole delight is in the destruction of men, so there is a class of artists, whose whole art and science is fabricated for the purpose of destroying art.” The principal hallmark of such artists was their use of oil paint, a medium that for Blake had blighted painting ever since it came in with Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian and other such second-raters. This trenchantly counter-cultural view of art history was designed to set him against the major institutions of the day. For it was the example of exactly these Old Masters that shaped the judgment of the Royal Academy, as well as the more patrician British Institution in Pall Mall—both of which, Blake complained in the Catalogue, had rejected his works.
His own exhibition was an attempt to side-step the system: “Mr B appeals to the public, from the judgment of those narrow blinking eyes, that have too long governed art in a dark corner.” Tendentiously, Blake considered oil to be an inadequate vehicle for colour, reducing everything to a yellowy murk. He offered, by contrast to Turner and Constable, what he provocatively called “real art.” This meant working in watercolour or tempera (where the pigment, dissolved in water, was mixed with a binding agent such as carpenter’s glue), a technique Blake called “fresco,” as though to imply its continuity with an older school of painting. Stylistically, his works were quite distinct, too, abandoning the chiaroscuro of the Old Masters for “unbroken lines, unbroken masses, and unbroken colours.” Blake saw himself as single-handedly rescuing an ancient skill from the crushing weight of the “blotting and blurring” favoured by the establishment. “The art has been lost: I have recovered it,” he told the world, adding with more than a touch of the showman: “How this was done, will be told, together with the whole process, in a work on art, now in the press.” (No such memoir appeared.)
“This is an awful thing to say to oil painters,” Blake mischievously conceded, “they may call it madness, but it is true.” They did call it madness: even the sympathetic man of letters, Henry Crabb Robinson, considered himself to be contemplating works by “the insane poet, painter, and engraver, Blake.” The exhibition was designed, Blake said, to put right the impression that his pictures were “a madman’s scrawls,” but it was also an attempt to become less of an “engraver” and more of a “painter.”
* As the curators of the large and stimulating new exhibition at Tate Britain are at pains to emphasise, despite his reputation (partly self-created) as a marginalised and impecunious figure of a heroic avant garde, Blake had a pretty successful career working as an engraver. “He survived, paid the rent, only once fell back on institutional charity,” remarks Martin Myrone in the handsome catalogue.
The curators trace Blake’s progress from an ambitious young student drawing classical sculpture at the Royal Academy schools through to his life as an engraver. They convey very successfully a sense of the whole world of print—of publishing projects and book collectors—through which he moved, as well as the economics of difficult patrons and the erratic business partners with whom Blake was entangled, not always unprofitably. The total effect is certainly to complicate the lonely genius theory of Blake’s career: the catalogue points out, for instance, that the Royal Academy actually showed two of his watercolours in 1808.
The Blake who emerges here was prickly, embattled, exasperated, the victim equally of conspiracy and cross purposes, but above all characterised by the quite extraordinary tenacity which saw him compose prophetic books and paint visionary paintings in the interstices of a seriously demanding artisanal day. Unsurprising, then, if Blake’s life as an engraver eventually began to pall, and that he should complain so bitterly about the “mediocrity to which I have hitherto been the victim.”
The centrepiece of this exhibition is a partial reconstruction of the Golden Square show, an excellent curatorial idea. Not all of the original 16 works have survived: among the losses is TheAncient Britons, the biggest painting Blake ever made (10 foot by 14), which represented the last heroic survivors of King Arthur’s court marching sturdily into the on-coming dark ages. But the Tate has gathered together eight of the surviving pieces, and by a clever gizmo two of them are visually “restored” to something like their original brightness by lighting. Time has not been kind to Blake’s colour-loving technique and some of the pictures have inadvertently become quite as murky as any Dutch interior.
What comes across strikingly is that Blake thought of his exhibition as a relaunch of British art as much as himself—“the distinction my works have obtained from those who best understand such things, calls for my exhibition as the greatest of duties to my country,” he announced. The subjects of the pictures were pretty miscellaneous, including several Biblical subjects re-imagined in Blakean mode.
But the most ambitious focused on the idea of England, from the large depiction of the complete cast of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (usually held in Pollok House in Glasgow but on display here), portraying a cross-section of the nation in progress, to the two most bizarre patriotic offerings: The Spiritual Form of Nelson guiding Leviathan and The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth. Both characters, recently busy bashing Napoleon, appear in unrecognisable forms. Nelson is all-but nude, with a full complement of arms and eyes, and apparently haloed, calmly encouraging a giant octopus to encoil drowning men; Pitt, also haloed, is draped like an eastern deity, and presides with imponderable passivity over scenes of apparently Dantesque calamity. Blake had no fondness for the French wars, and the temptation is to see these paintings as critical of their subjects in a left-wing way; but if there is any criticism it is extremely indirect. Nelson, especially, looks like a superhero.
It was Blake’s apparently sincere hope that these two works would serve as prototypes for “a national commission to execute these two pictures on a scale that is suitable to the grandeur of the nation,” by which he meant a hundred feet high and a cheque from the king. Tate has blown up the pictures to that size and projected them on to a wall, not in their entirety, naturally, but as a square wandering over their surface, which does at least get across the crazy scale of the project.
* The 1809 exhibition did not transform Blake’s fortunes. Very few people came, nothing was sold, and it had only one review, from the Examiner, which quite missed any latent political energy in the pictures and returned to the usual old charge (“an unfortunate lunatic”), describing the pictures as “wretched” and the Catalogue as a “farrago of nonsense.” The following years were tough: the Blakes moved into two small rooms off the Strand. In what must have been a bittersweet moment, he picked up a one-off grant of £25 from the Royal Academy, who recognised “an able designer & engraver labouring under great distress,” but not a painter.
Things were not unremittingly bleak, however. Blake befriended the landscape painter John Linnell, who either gave him money or provided a route to get some. His last years were fruitful, with a series of portraits of the weird people and creatures that Blake had encountered in his visions—the lovely woodcuts for Virgil’s Pastorals—and a great series of watercolours illustrating (if that is the right word) Dante and Bunyan, remarkable works all generously represented here. He was now in the unprecedented situation of being surrounded by young admirers, painters and writers such as Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert, and his old hand-crafted books of illuminated verse, which must have languished in dusty cupboards since he printed them in the early years of the century, suddenly became voguish among a select group of collectors. He charged good prices too: the message of the writings might have been radical, but the old Blake was selling them off as fine publications to the well-to-do.
Some of those works are on display in the earlier galleries, not disbound and turned into things to frame and hang on the wall, but surviving as small, hand-made books. It is very good to see them: the facsimiles you can find, either in the magnificent six-volume edition published by Tate or in the no less wonderful online versions presented in the William Blake Archive, show them in all their eccentric art, but you don’t get a full sense of how tiny, how bijou, some of them were until you see them in the flesh. They are a spur to remember that Blake was, to be sure, a fearsomely dedicated painter who gave a life to resurrecting the moribund genius of English art, but he was also a writer. And though TS Eliot was doubtless right to say that his philosophical system had the honest quality of being cobbled together like “an ingenious piece of home-made furniture,” Blake thought he was on to something of world-shattering significance and spent decades inventing a vast mythology to enshrine it.
The benefits from conceiving Blake squarely as a visual artist, as the Tate show does, are rich and multiple; but in the end I think his claim as a writer is probably greater. His writings also importantly inform his memorably strange, freeze-frame paintings of floating statuesque super-beings. The marvellous image of Newton at the bottom of the sea, for instance, emerges from Blake’s long and ferociously cranky argument with the scientist which a visitor to the Tate might like to know about. And you could say that the best gloss on the weirdly brilliant inter-animation of the quotidian and the visionary that enlivens the best of Blake’s paintings is Blake’s verse, in which London and Eternity meet on the easy terms that only his imperturbable genius could organise: “What are those golden Builders doing/Near mournful ever-weeping Paddington?”
